


And if You Like to Rest Awhile

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Series: Educational Experiences (college AU) [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, M/M, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 22:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10706412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: To: myyyy BFF Hunk?There is a GIANT SPIDER ON MY CEILINGIF IT KILLS METELL MY MOM I LOVE HERTo: LanceAww, don’t hurt the spiderIn which there is a giant spider on Lance's dorm room ceiling and Keith's heater is broken. Two problems somehow make a solution.





	And if You Like to Rest Awhile

**Author's Note:**

> Haha, I should be working on an update for True Love or Something...but real life's been kicking my ass lately so have this bit of dumb college fluff instead. 
> 
> Some of what happens in this fic is loosely based on stuff that happened to me at some point. I'm irrationally afraid of spiders too, Lance. You're not alone. And yeah, I once had a huge, terrifying spider on my ceiling but unlike Lance I was too chicken to ask a neighbor for help and just skipped straight to throwing a boot at it (after an embarrassing hour of trying and failing to squash it). 
> 
> I'm considering doing a follow-up fic to this one featuring Keith's POV of the events of this fic...we'll see what happens.

**And if You Like to Rest Awhile**

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

Buddy

Pal

Best of bestest friends

If I die tonight

You…

Can have my Pokemon cards **.**

**To: Lance**

Um.

Buddy…

What’s going on???

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

There is a GIANT FUCKING SPIDER ON MY CEILING

IF IT KILLS ME

TELL MY MOM I LOVE HER

**To: Lance**

Aww, don’t hurt the spider

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?  
** HUNK

DUDE

GIANT MURDER-SPIDER

ON MY CEILING

ABOVE MY BED

WHERE I SLEEP

IT COULD DESCEND

WHILE I SNOOZE,

DEFENSELESS

AND DEVOUR ME

**To: Lance**

I really don’t think that’s a possibility…

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

Kay, but it could be poisonous

And I could die

Just throwing that out there

**To: Lance**

Just catch it under a cup and set it free

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

Hunk

Old buddy

Old pal

Spiders are the most terrifying things on earth

**To: Lance**

Actually, food-borne illness is the most terrifying thing

Objectively

On earth

We’d never see it coming

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

FOCUS ON THE MURDER-SPIDER

What do I do?

Afhgajkgd

It twitched

*it’s coming for me*

**To: Lance**

You are not going to die by spider

There are only like 3 poisonous spiders

Native to the Pacific Northwest

You’re fine

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?  
** Yeah, and this could be one of them.

That’s it

Neither can live while the other survives

I’m gonna kill the murder-spider

**To: Lance**

Noooo

It’s innocent!

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

Shit

Don’t worry

I chickened out

I can’t get close enough to it

Without shaking

Fuck arachnophobia

HUNK IT MOVED

Okay, it twitched but it was a SIGN

**To: Lance**

Sigh

If you really must kill

This poor innocent creature

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

HUNK

**To: Lance**

Just ask someone on your hall to squish it

Or your roommate

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

Dude, the only reason I know Rolo isn’t dead

Is because he keeps sending me stoned Snapchats

The man is a stoner

Dedicated to the stone

Well, actually to the weed

But you know what I mean

Long story short:

Haven’t seen my roomie all weekend

It’s Sunday night.

**To: Lance**

Ask a neighbor?

**To: myyyy BFF Hunk?**

Ugh.

…

            Lance sits on the floor and gives the eight-legged interloper on his ceiling the stink-eye. He has to keep watching it. After all, if he looks away it could scuttle off to god-knows-where and then he’d be screwed because, Hunk’s reassuring info aside, it would be just Lance’s luck to end up with one of three breeds of poisonous spider native to the Pacific Northwest on his dorm room ceiling.

            He misses Hunk. Having your best friend all the way on the other side of the freaking country is no picnic. Going to different colleges is the worst.

            (Okay, the time zone difference is actually the worst. Lance honestly loves his university and Hunk loves his and it’s all great…but the three-hour time difference sucks. Plus no in-state bestie means no one to come remove scary arachnid horrors from Lance’s ceiling.)

            Lance glares at the spider, “I hate you.”

            The spider does not respond because it is a spider and incapable of human speech.

            Lance shudders and goes back to glaring at it, pulling up Pidge’s number on his speed-dial.

            _“What, Lance?”_

            “Pidge, can you come dispose of a spider for me?”

            _“Short answer, no. Long answer, do it yourself.”_

            “Come one Pidge! Pleeeeeease?”

            She sighs, _“Lance, normally I would indulge your weird phobia and come get rid of whatever insect or insect-like creature is bothering you, but I really, really can’t right now. I have a massive test in O-Chem tomorrow and a lab report due at eight am. I cannot leave the chem building right now, I’m sorry.”_

            Oh shit. Lance knows she’s serious if she’s saying ‘sorry’. That means she really can’t do it and actually kind of feels bad. “Okay, I get it. Sorry to bug you.”

            _“It’s no problem, wish I could help with the spider thing.”_

“Yeah, me too.” He hangs up.

            Well fuck.

…

            When the spider actually moves Lance shrieks and runs out into the hallway. It doesn’t move much. Barely a few inches, really. But those few inches feel like a _mile_ now that he knows without a shadow of a doubt that the spider is in fact alive and coming for him.

            So maybe he overreacted.

            Maybe he shouldn’t have rushed headlong out into the hallway in response to one little spider step.

            Maybe if he hadn’t charged into the hallway without looking where he’s going he wouldn’t be embracing the floor with his face at the moment, having tripped over a warm, solid, very human body sitting on the industrial carpet outside his door.

            Maybe.

            “Oh my _god_ ,” Lance groans articulately, “ _Ow._ ”

            “What the fuck?” a voice growls painfully behind him and Lance roll-flops over only to find himself meeting the pissed-off purple gaze of The Guy Who Lives Across the Hall.

            To date, Lance knows next to nothing about The Guy Who Lives Across the Hall other than he lives in the single room across the hall from Lance and Rolo’s double, he removed the name tag from his door on the first day, he never comes to hall events, and he is, objectively, one of the most beautiful human beings Lance has ever gazed longingly at from a distance. Oh, and he’s probably pretty mad at Lance right now.

            “Uh, hi? Sorry about that?” Lance offers, scrunching his body into a vaguely upright position.

            The Guy Who Lives Across the Hall stares at him like he’s from another planet.

            “Hi, the name’s Lance,” he babbles, “I swear I don’t normally kick people in the face while running screaming in the middle of the night, what’s your name?”

            The Guy Who Lives Across the Hall blinks slowly at him and says, words sounding like they’ve been dragged out of his body the hard way, “You’re wearing pajama pants with cartoon sharks on them and a hot pink tank top.”

            “Uh, yeah? Don’t knock the shark pants, dude. These are some on-point sartorial decisions right here.”

            “You know the word ‘sartorial’?”

            “Don’t sound so skeptical, it makes you seem like an asshole,” Lance says cheerily.

            The Guy blinks at him slowly and Lance realizes he’s wearing mittens. Honest-to-god multicolored mittens that can only be homemade because no human being would pay money for them. And a hat that matches only in the sense that it also looks like a homemade yarn monstrosity. The Guy’s dark hair sticks out at crazy angles under the hat and he’s curled in on himself like a grouchy kitten.

            It’s actually pretty adorable.

            The Guy blinks and Lance catches sight of some wicked dark circles curling under his storm-cloud-colored eyes. “Sorry. I’m –“ the sentence is interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn, “Tired.”

            “What are you doing in the hall, man? And why are you geared up to climb Everest?”

            The Guy looks at his mitten-ed hands, “I wouldn’t climb Everest dressed like this. There would be more gear. Definitely.”

            “Okay, not the point, let’s refocus here, my man.”

            The Guy yawns again and Lance tries not to find it cute. “The heat’s broken in my room. I can’t sleep. ‘S like the freezer section in – “ another yawn, “Costco.”

            “How long has it been like that?” Lance asks; mother hen mode activated.

            The Guy shrugs, “Three days. Campus maintenance says they’ll fix it.”

            “This is unacceptable,” Lance huffs dramatically because why do anything halfway? “Come on, you’re staying in my room. My roommate’s been on a weed-fueled vision quest since Thursday. You can have his bed – ” Lance is halfway to standing, the stinging of his rug-burned cheek mostly forgotten when he suddenly remembers, “Shit.”

            “What?” The Guy asks, still on the floor.

            “There’s a hell-spider on my ceiling.”

            “Oh.” The Guy pauses, thinks, and nods to himself before standing, “I got it.” And he opens the door to Lance’s room, still hunched in his too-big maroon hoodie, pulls off his boot and throws it at Lance’s ceiling.

            He hits the spider dead-on. Spider and boot fall to the ground with a muffled thump.

            The Guy looks over his shoulder at Lance. “We good?”

            Lance twitches and does _not_ squeak, “Sure. We’re good. Please marry me.”

            The Guy blinks, slow and smooth, and says gravely, “Maybe when I’ve had a full night’s sleep.”

            “Sure thing, dude.”

…

            The next morning Lance wakes up to a stranger’s boot on his floor (the spider graciously disposed of by said stranger) and a beautiful boy half-asleep in the bed across the room.

            “Did I offer to marry you for killing a spider for me last night?” Lance asks muzzily.

            The other guy yawns extravagantly and stretches in a way that must be considered a sin by most major religions, “I’ll still consider it if you feed me breakfast.”

            “Um. Deal. Uh…what’s your name?”

            The stranger smiles and it’s small and sly and Lance’s heart definitely squeezed in a funny, not-normal way. “Keith.”

            “Lance. My name’s Lance.”

            “You mentioned that.”

            “Okay.”

            A long moment of silence where they stare at each other. Finally Keith tips his head to the side and says, “So, breakfast?”

            “Breakfast,” Lance agrees, then grins crookedly, “Breakfast and my hand in marriage if you play your cards right.”

            “Pretty sure marriage isn’t first date material.”

            Lance’s heart squeezes harder. _First date!!!!_ His brain shrieks, _He said first date!!!_ “Uh, excuse you,” his mouth says, “Our spider-slaying was our first date. Victory breakfast is our _second_ date, thank you very much.”

            “Can our third date be fixing my room’s heat?”

            “Uh, I can tell your heater I’m not mad, just disappointed really sternly? Beyond that my mechanical skills are nil.”

            Keith grins and it’s a flirty grin, Lance is getting flirty-grinned at by his pretty across the hall neighbor who kills spiders with well-thrown combat boots and wears dorky homemade knitwear. Lance’s heart might not survive this experience. “Then I’ll just have to sleep here until they fix it.”

            Lance grins back, “Sounds like a plan.”

**Author's Note:**

> You know Keith thought that SAT vocabulary was cute. Using 'sartorial' in a sentence? Adorable. (I will never let go of my lit nerd Keith headcanons)
> 
> Fic title from the poem 'The Spider and the Fly' because I think I'm funny.


End file.
